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Einstein's errors

Published 5 November 2008

From Sebastian Hayes

I find Andrew Robinson’s list of Einstein’s scientific “errors” in his critique of Hans C. Ohanian’s book on the subject (27 September, p 48) rather odd, to say the least. One of them is apparently that Einstein “should have realised that the constancy of the speed of light had to be established by experiment, not by stipulation”. But if Einstein hadn’t stipulated it, and predicted such far-reaching consequences, experimenters would probably not have persisted with difficult and expensive experiments.

Science advances by vast, fruitful generalisations such as Galileo’s principle of relativity, unprovable at the time, or Newton’s theory of universal attraction, which only began to be established experimentally by Cavendish many years after Newton’s death.

And Einstein was certainly not wrong in being sceptical about the questionable philosophical assumptions underlying the orthodox version of quantum theory. There’s more to science than experiment plus advanced mathematics&colon; we also need big, clear, synthetic ways of looking at the physical universe. Einstein provided one such view.

The root “error” of people like Einstein is that they aren’t content to sit on the fence. Physicists these days usually insist that their job is only to examine the “how” and to leave the “why” to philosophers or metaphysicians.

From Peter Duffell

Albert Einstein had a lifelong belief that there should be underlying (simple) principles that govern the universe. As a young man, this conviction led to the famous letters that laid the foundations for special relativity. Later, this conviction led him on his search for a unified theory.

Some may say that this was a mistake, as Robinson discusses. But Einstein’s countless challenges to quantum theory actually strengthened general belief in its validity, even though he himself was deeply troubled by the concept of randomness. This conviction was also what enabled him to understand the implications of the thinking of other intellectuals, such as Max Planck, and it gave their ideas real meaning in the theoretical world.

When discussing Einstein we should bear in mind that his theoretical thinking opened up a world of possibility that has given us lasers and the idea of black holes. While this contribution to science is awe-inspiring, he was also a human being. I think we should respect that and accept that even as the father of theoretical physics he cannot possibly have got all of special relativity in his head in 1905 without a few errors or omissions. We should cut him a bit of slack.